So it’s … not August. There goes that particular New Year’s resolution. Most of them took less time for me to break, though, so I still choose to be impressed with myself. (So there.) Also, I was studying for the GRE, so there was that.

(For those of you who may be wondering, yes, I have already gone to grad school, but I never had to take the GRE, so I had to take it to go on back. Which made me feel some kind of way, as I’m sure you can imagine. But the multiple choice part went well, and hopefully the essays did, too!)

Anyway, while I was camped out at my parents’ house studying, my parents were going through old stuff in their basement. Though my apartment is pleasantly airy, I have approximately two centimeters of storage space here, so a lot of my old stuff is still living there. They asked me to go through some of it to see if anything could be donated to the upcoming VNA sale. (Hometown shout out — I remember when people used to cut class to go to opening day of the VNA sale. Honestly, some of the teachers didn’t even mind. Even more of the teachers didn’t mind if students cut class for the soccer team’s empanada sales, as long as they brought some back to share.) Whether or not any VNA customers will want a bunch of DVD box sets for TV shows I don’t care about anymore or the entire CD collection of a teenager circa 2004 is an entirely different question, but they’re there now if anyone does.

What I didn’t get rid of were my boxes of first draft notebooks. Pretty much the entirety of THE CHILDREN WAR’s first draft was written longhand, and that first draft was long. It was also remarkably bad. I’d like to say that’s because I’d never written a novel before, but honestly I’m not sure if my first drafts have actually gotten any better since then. So I have no intention of actually reading these notebooks, but I also don’t want to throw them out. How delightful was it to flip through and spot bygone characters (some of whom I’d completely forgotten existed) and old spellings? How great was it to see my old writing exercises exploring my characters’ pasts? I will never probably never again write anything at such a leisurely pace and with such a tolerance for pure self-indulgence. That’s not to say that I didn’t take it seriously; I definitely did. But I knew that I was traveling without a map, and the best way to do that is to investigate every walkway, no matter how seemingly unimportant.

Much of the first draft of MISBEGOTTEN CREATURES was represented in the notebooks, as well. I didn’t write all of that longhand, mostly because I had actual grad school deadlines to meet with it. But I remember taking a notebook down to the Charles River and glaring at the geese as I tried to figure out how to make that story work. (I didn’t figure that out for a few more years.) The margins are crowded with notes to myself that seemed important at the time but generally weren’t. Some more beloved cut characters live in those pages. Maybe they’ll find new life in a future project, or maybe they only existed to teach me things about the characters who did make the final cut.

To my mom’s delight, I found some ancient Judas story pages (EVENTUALLY, MOM). There was even some old work on middle-grade story; I sometimes forget that this is by no means a new project. In fact, I workshopped my first outing with my main character in undergrad. I spent a semester working with the story in grad school, but then werewolf story came along and took over for the next couple years. I was actually annoyed about it at the time. I wanted to keep working on middle-grade story, but the requirements of the program wouldn’t allow it. Obviously, I’m happy with the way things worked out now. Werewolf story was a book that I needed to write at the time in my life when I wrote it, and I’m very proud of the way it turned out.

I’m glad I saw those old notebooks again, because they reminded me of a few things. First of all, they reminded me to write longhand when I get stuck. Why on earth have I not been doing this with middle-grade story lately?? I focus better writing longhand, partially because I don’t have to use the old distraction box (a.k.a. my laptop) to do it, and possibly also because my thoughts and my writing are more evenly paced than my thoughts and my typing. (That was a humblebrag about how fast I type, or possibly how slow I think? I’m not sure I humblebragged right.) Also, seeing words and worlds spilling across a page in my own handwriting pleases me.

That was another thing that the notebooks reminded me to do: enjoy the ride. Every word of those notebooks was written with love, even when I felt like throwing said notebooks into the river with the geese. Having a physical reminder of the joy of writing was something I needed right now. It’s been a weird … three years … personally and professionally, not to mention politically. Honestly, it’s been getting to me. I’ve spent most of this summer exhausted, castigating myself for self-perceived laziness that I know I don’t actually possess. I’ve had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. Not always a great combination.

But I’m doing it. Slowly and without a lot of tangible outcomes, but still. I’m constantly engaged in labors of love, just as I have been since the first time I touched pen to paper. I’m not saying those notebooks completely cured me of every envy or frustration or anxious negativity of 2017, but they were a balm to my striving soul. Hey, you make up people and places and turn them into language, they said to me. That’s cool and weird. Keep doing it. Have fun.

My family knows me very well. I have always been quite open about both my emotions and opinions (I’m going with “open” as opposed to “an over-sharer”), and I feel like I’m relatively easy to figure out as a person anyway. However, there are some (very minor) misconceptions that have worked their way into the things people believe about me. I’m not talking about misjudgments of character or anything like that. I’m strictly speaking about the completely innocuous and at most mildly annoying assumptions that people make. I’m sure everyone knows someone who once expressed mild fondness for an animal/flower/band/etc. only for the world to decide that they are OBSESSED with that animal/flower/band/etc. and to make it the theme of every gift forever. That person then goes on to politely accumulate like 8,000 peacock figurines, which they now regard with an air of grim resignation.

For me, the strange mythologies that have sprung up around me are “Kathleen is never cold” and “Kathleen remembers everything about the books she reads.” As for the former, just because I like cool weather doesn’t mean I’m not cold in the dead of winter. (Also, the reason I wander around the house barefoot when it’s cold out, Mom, is that my feet are literally always cold and I just don’t notice it anymore. Also we’re inside.)

I realized recently that even I had fallen for the latter misconception, though. My memory is indeed very strong in some regards. For example, I have some memories from a weirdly early age. My earliest is from around 18 months, when my mom EXTREMELY ACCIDENTALLY hit me in the face with a seat belt. I don’t blame you if you’re skeptical, but I’ve corroborated specific details that were never part of a story about it, such as what side of the car I was sitting on and details about the car seat. (Also, can I just reiterate how much my mom did not mean to do this? She cried way harder than I did.) I have multiple memories from ages two and three, as well — bouncing in the stroller with my sister over a cobblestone road is a particularly fond one.

Then when I started to read, I was never content to only read one book at a time. Once I discovered The Baby-Sitters Club, I would have a stack six- or seven-deep beside my bed at all times, with a bookmark in each one. (I probably would have had more if I’d been allowed to take more out from the library.) My parents would marvel aloud that I could keep all of the stories straight, and lo, a personal legend was born.

I definitely cultivated this perception of me as a Reader Extraordinaire. I was deeply protective of and arrogant about this aspect of my identity, as I think many bookish kids are. I remember having “quote competitions” with my best friend circa eighth grade, in which we would quote the most impossibly obscure lines from Harry Potter at each other, trying to come up with one that the other person wouldn’t recognize. (I think we stumped each other once each.) Obnoxious performative bookishness aside, I genuinely could rattle off a great deal of detail from the books that I read and loved.

As I look at my bookshelf now, though, I find plenty of books that I know I enjoyed, but can barely remember anything about. I mentioned that I was rereading one of these forgotten books several months back, and my mom teased, “I didn’t think you ever forgot a book.” My arrogant child self experienced a brief moment of panic. I looked over the shelves and realized that details about characters and plots from books I had read only in the past few months now escaped me. What had become of my amazing book memory?

Well, my memory probably isn’t actually as good as it was when I was a kid. I definitely don’t read seven books at once anymore. But also, it was probably never actually that amazing, anyway. I’ve never been all that great with names, and even less so with dates. (Minoring in art history was a bit of a challenge.) The books I remember the best from childhood are either the ones that I read for school or the ones that became all-time favorites. The connection? Conversation. I never immediately stored the information I read in my long-term memory the way I’d proudly assumed that I did. I just talked about books literally all the time, and the repetition drove the details home. The books on my shelves that I don’t remember as well are the ones I’ve never had an in-depth discussion about.

I’ve always had a vague hypothesis that being a twin has a lot to do with my long memory. My sister also remembers our adventures in the stroller. I don’t know if she remembers the seat belt incident, but she does remember me falling down the stairs at my grandparents’ house when we were two. (I didn’t actually get injured all that often.) Our parents and other adult relatives obviously spoke to us all the time, but we also spoke to each other. These were conversations between cognitive equals, so we probably had to work harder to understand and be understood. I wonder if there was something about our communication skills growing in tandem that helped us to store our shared experiences in our memories. Of course, I know very little about the science of memory, so I could be entirely making this up. (It’s possible that my sister, who does know about the science of memory, will yell at me after I post this.) But I do have a good memory for conversations I have had, and it seems probable that my “good memory for books” had more to do with that aspect of my cognition than it ever had to do with actually reading.

This realization actually makes me really happy. I may not have been as ~remarkable as I once thought I was, but I did have a family who let me babble to my heart’s content about the books that I liked. Later on, I found friends who were eager to do the same. I still get to talk about books that I have in common with these friends, and I cherish and remember these conversations. The fact that I don’t remember all the books on my shelf just means that I need to make time for more of these conversations. I’ve been living alone since completing my Master’s, and though I was only literally a hermit for six months, I sometimes let myself get a bit isolated. I’m going to try to stop doing that. I want to have as many memories as possible.

I talk about monsters to anyone who’ll listen. I can figure out a way to introduce the topic into a truly impressive variety of conversations, and half the time it’ll even sound natural. I am nothing if not single-minded. As a result, I’ve had many people ask me what my favorite monster is, and of course it will come as no surprise that my answer is WEREWOLVES. I often follow this up with, “They’re just so versatile!” Depending on the audience, this is met with either a murmur of agreement or a really strange look.

Werewolves’ versatility is derived from their simplicity. They’re human ’til they’re not. They’re human ’til they’re beast. That’s all there is to it. As such, they embody some of the fundamentals of monstrosity, but what precisely it all means will depend entirely on the context of their story. You can explore just about any fear or hatred or taboo desire with werewolves. Consequently, there are countless werewolf stories out in the world. Some are terrible, some are great, but all are different. I can’t imagine ever growing bored with this monster.

One thing I have identified as an aspect of some werewolf stories that really speaks to me is the narrative of learning to embrace a formerly-rejected part of the self. I can get mad theoretical right here (and I’m currently revising a paper on monsters, so the temptation is strong), but suffice to say that when two (or more!) seemingly disparate points of view coexist within a single subject — and at least one of them is Wrong (for example, a giant bloodthirsty wolf) — that subject has a few options. The option that most interests me is the decision to embrace the Wrongness, to empathize with it, to take care of it, to expand with it. The werewolf (or any monster) who loves and is loved by their monstrosity is my entire jam.

Another thing that I doggedly insist about monster theory is that it has practical, real-life applications. Allow me to demonstrate with myself. I have OCD and social anxiety disorder. I talk about the former kind of a lot, so most people reading this probably already knew that. I talk about the social anxiety less, because it’s historically been less of a Thing (relatively speaking), but I can’t imagine anyone who knows me is overly surprised by this diagnosis. I consider my anxiety (of both varieties) to be mooooostly under control these days. This has certainly not always been the case, and I’m very proud of the work I’ve done to deal with my prone-to-screaming brain, especially on the OCD front.

Recently, I participated in an event that caused way more social anxiety than usual. It was an unpleasant reminder that general nervousness and disordered anxiety aren’t the same thing, and no matter how many times I’ve pushed through the former (and I have! a lot!), that doesn’t mean the latter can’t still knock me on my ass. It was a frustrating and disheartening experience, because I had been hoping to represent myself as a really interesting, thoughtful, and hard-working person. I am a really interesting, thoughtful, and hard-working person! (And clearly my self-esteem is fine!) So what the hell was going on? Why was I letting this thing — this anxiety, this invader — hide who I really am?

That’s when I started thinking about werewolves.

At first, I totally rebelled against the association. Anxiety disorders are medical conditions, not monsters. They aren’t coexisting points of view within me. They’re just chemicals and synapses and whatever. I didn’t ask for them and I certainly don’t have to let them determine who I am. I’m not all that unwanted stuff. I’m only the parts that I choose to be.

… Except substitute “curse” for “chemicals,” and you have the internal monologue of every newly minted werewolf ever.

And wasn’t my OCD the reason I did an AmeriCorps term? After all those agonizing months of obsessing over the effects of climate change, I chose to turn that pain into action and help actual victims of a natural disaster. I couldn’t fix all the suffering that our degraded environment has caused and will cause, but I did something, and it was something I wouldn’t have done without anxiety.

My anxiety has poured into my writing and made it so much stronger. I gave different parts of it to various characters (and all of it to one of them), and I also made these characters brave. Someday young anxious readers will read about these characters and see anxiety not only permitting bravery, but fueling it. I could not have done that without my own anxiety, either.

Hell, even my social anxiety is mostly focused on a fear of interrupting or inconveniencing people. It will make me uncomfortable, but it really doesn’t want anyone else to be. Both of my anxiety disorders just want everyone to be happy.

(Content notice: this post contains a description of being followed by a street harasser.)

So it’s been a Month, nationally speaking. Right now, every website I go to is screaming at me about the Paris Accord. My brain is kind of always screaming about the Paris Accord, so it’s nothing I’m not used to on one level. And hey, as of this writing, nothing’s official-official. Maybe we’ll stay in? And if we don’t, then at least that means we won’t be sabotaging everyone else?

Yeah, I know, not much of a bright side. But it’s all we have to work with right now. That and constant constant constant constant political pressure from all of us. Miles to go before we sleep and all that.

Hmm. Thus far, the tone of this blog post is a little wearier than I intended it to be. I am tired, but I’m nowhere near giving up on believing in all the things humanity is capable of achieving. I’m honestly not. Like, this is not a bad zombie apocalypse drama. The answer to “but do we deserve to survive?” is still a resounding yes. It will always be yes, and the people who believe in that yes will always keep fighting. Listen: there are a lot of us, in my country and everyone else’s. We’re tired, but we don’t give up.

Of course, there are those other people. The ones who necessitate the fighting. A couple of months ago, I wrote about good guys and bad guys. I was focused on the former, but man there have been a lot of the latter hanging around lately, haven’t there? Big-time bad guys in charge. Small-time bad guys coming out of the woodwork. The other week, a man followed me in his car and called obscene things out the window at me. When I detoured away from him, he waited for me to reemerge so he could continue. His voice was very, very calm. After the second time I turned, he didn’t follow. A block later, the feeling returned to my fingers as I stopped hyperventilating.

Of course that could have happened under any other president. But that experience just felt like it fit into a pattern. Even now, I want to downplay what happened: he didn’t get out of the car, he didn’t touch me, he didn’t follow me home. So no big deal, right? I probably wasn’t in real danger. But as brief as that encounter was, it felt like real danger, and that was the point. That man tried to scare me, and he succeeded.

I don’t get that. I fundamentally don’t understand what it feels like to want someone to be terrified. I also don’t understand what it feels like to have access to a whole world’s fear — fear of environmental degradation, fear of crushing poverty, fear of escalating wars — and just not care. What is it like to see someone who is afraid and not want to comfort them?

Don’t get me wrong, I know how it happens. I know there are a million different sociological and psychological forces that can bleed the empathy out of a person. A man who takes pleasure in scaring a woman doesn’t empathize with that woman because he fundamentally does not see her as human. Insert a bunch more isms, blow it up on a national scale, and you have a group of rich, white men who don’t care about the fear of everyone else in the same way that I don’t care how the huge spider who hung out in my apartment for a few days felt. I just wanted it to leave me alone and not interfere with my life.

But knowing how people become that way is not the same thing as understanding what it’s actually like to see other people as inconvenient spiders. I guess their lack of empathy is the limit of my own. I can digest and comprehend all of the sociopolitical reasons, but on a purely emotional level, I still keep coming up with “but why?”

Honestly? I’m okay with that. I do think it’s absolutely important to be able to intellectually understand the forces that drive the people who do harm in the world. Hiding from that will never be a good idea. But I don’t think gazing into the abyss necessarily requires diving in headfirst. I’m not going to be playing Donald Trump or scary-car-guy in a movie any time soon.

I do, however, write villainous characters. The main antagonists of THE CHILDREN’S WAR, MISBEGOTTEN CREATURES, and middle-grade story are different in a lot of ways, but they all essentially boil down to hunger for power. I’d be interested to hear if anyone ever wrote a bona fide villain who didn’t. (I do know that some antagonists are motivated by other things, but of course not all antagonists are villains.)

So I’ve made these people up. I know their backstories. I know the sociopolitical forces (and grievous personality flaws) that have made them who they are. But I don’t emotionally connect with them the way I do with all of my other characters. I don’t feel what they feel. I don’t know how.

In MISBEGOTTEN CREATURES, one of my characters is an empath who literally (like, on a brain chemistry level) feels the emotions of everyone in his immediate vicinity. (It’s one of the crueler things I’ve done to a character, though there is some steep competition in that regard.) Spoiler alert for a book that doesn’t exist in the world yet: the antagonist does wind up in his radius at a certain point. Actually, now that I think about it, he also is around street harassers in another scene, so he fits this blog post doubly well. His reaction to both of these situations is total scorn.

Of course, I’m just guessing, because I can’t do what he did. I can’t emotionally get inside their heads. But I stand by my guess. Power-hungry villains are interesting because of the effect they have on other characters, but I don’t think they’re very interesting in and of themselves. Donald Trump does not fascinate me. If you can kind of think of the president as the protagonist of the country’s story, then the plot is certainly off the rails, but the character development is shit. How does a character grow if they don’t care? How am I supposed to get invested in a character who is not invested in anyone else?

Waste of time, if you ask me. Maybe that means my villains will be flat. I hope not: I work hard on their dialogue and try to make them compellingly menacing. (Based on Trump and scary-car-guy, maybe I’ve been putting too much thought into the dialogue. Neither of them really seem to.) But the interesting people are the ones who care. So go forth and be interesting.

When I was at my parents’ house for Easter a couple of weeks ago, my mother plunked a sheet of sketchbook paper in front of me. It was filled, front and back, with an elaborately loopy cursive scrawl that I recognized as my 10-year-old handwriting. I recognized it instantly: it was the first two (and maybe only two?) pages of a “novel” about vampires. I could remember the exact unit in Australia where I had scribbled it down. We were there with lots of family, visiting lots of family. Australia owns a lot of my heart and I really want to go back, but that is perhaps a different post for a different day. What I was delighted to discover/remember was that a) apparently my fondness for writing in hotel rooms started super early (the first thing I ever wrote down for story was on hotel stationary in Venice) and b) clearly so did my fondness for monsters.

I had not remembered this particular vampire idea in — well, probably about 18 years — but it immediately came back to me. It was written from the point of view of a kid named Dan, who has been best friends with Van (short for Vanessa, or “Vannessa” as I apparently thought it was spelled) for several years. They bonded over their rhyming nicknames. Van always came over to Dan’s house, though, because her parents were very “private.”

Of course, it turns out that the real reason is that they are VAMPIRES.

Van will be a vampire, too, but she isn’t one yet. You see, vampires can totally have kids, but they don’t start off as immortal creatures of the night, because then you’d just have a newborn with insatiable blood lust forever, and that’s not a good idea. So the process of becoming a vampire starts slowly around puberty (at age 10, I was morbidly fascinated with the concept of Puberty) and completes in early adulthood, at which point you stay like that forever. Van doesn’t want to become a vampire, or at least not the killing people variety, and so the story was going to involve figuring out how to remain partially human. I don’t know if I ever worked out those details, but I do know that substituting citrus fruits for blood was a major solution. For some reason. She did remain part-vampire, though, I know that; shades of Renesmee aside, I’m pleased that baby Kathleen knew that monsters had to stay monsters.

Also, I’m not sure if Dan’s “voice” is something that’s really detectable in two handwritten pages by a 10-year-old, but what little was there was pretty much straight up stolen from Marco in Animorphs.

All of this is to say that I was DELIGHTED by my mother’s discovery and also by my weirdo childhood self. If you had asked me before Easter when my love of monsters began, I probably would have placed it around age 13 (that was The Summer Of Thinking About Literally Nothing But Remus Lupin). Apparently, though, I was already predisposed to think about monsters — and to root for them.

I spent most of today working on an academic paper about monstrosity, and I couldn’t help but think about that 10-year-old in the hotel room. She wouldn’t like everything I had to tell her about age 28. She’d expected more to have happened by now. She’d thought that, at this point, everything would be settled and sure. Hadn’t she already done the heavy lifting of deciding what she wanted to be when she grew up?

(I wouldn’t tell her anything about the sociopolitical state of things in 2017, because I’m not a horrible person.)

But then I’d tell her that I still think about monsters every day of my life, and most days I write about them in some form or another. I’d tell her I haven’t stopped inventing girls with deadly bites who choose what kind of monster they want to be, and boys who are willing to do the dangerous thing and stand by their friends. I’d tell her that I have long and jubilant conversations about stories, like, all the time (because, oh yeah, I have way more friends now, and they all love to read). I’d tell her I still write in hotel rooms, and when I write longhand, it’s always in cursive (just a little less loopy now).

She wouldn’t be brave enough to ask if she really had to be as afraid of growing up as she was, and I wouldn’t be brave enough to attempt an answer. But I’d let her know that the things she loved are still the things I love, and that would make us both smile.

I’m sure every writer out there has been told to read their work out loud while editing. It’s standard advice, and it makes sense. It’s much harder to miss little details when you slow down enough to say every word. A lot of entry-level writing advice is aimed at inserting some practicality into the sometimes chaotic process of making stuff up and writing it down. Even the most ~artistic of souls has to occasionally be methodical.

Here’s the thing, though: I’ve never heard anyone talk about how ridiculously fun line-editing is. You get to read all the stuff you wrote! Out loud! As dramatically as you like! Theoretically, you like the stuff you wrote at this point, because it’s not like you’d be line-editing your shitty first drafts. (Unless you’re the kind of writer whose first drafts aren’t shitty, in which case: well isn’t that just wonderful for you.) (Just kidding, I respect everyone’s ~process.) (But I mean, honestly.)

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of line editing in 2017 on a couple of different projects, and honestly it’s been a blast. I was always the kid in high school English who got uncomfortably into the read aloud assignments (I have a specific memory of just going for broke as Oedipus). I never took any drama or acting classes (which I regret), so reading out loud is probably my way of indulging my own desire to perform, even if I’m my only audience. Plus, is there anything better than getting to a line you’re really proud of and just hearing your own words in the air? Or discovering a paragraph with a perfect rhythm?

Yes, line editing is work — you’re also going to run into some godawful sentences that assault your ears. I mean, that’s the point of line editing in the first place: to find and fix all those mistakes. But enjoy the parts that you got right. Pat yourself on the back. Have fun.

Also, for both writers and non-writers who love words, a self-care method that I highly recommend is to read your favorite books out loud to yourself. Roll around in some great language. My last several blog posts have been kind of heavy and I didn’t want this one to be, but suffice to say that everyone can use a little self-care in 2017. I read Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo this year (and have been unable to stop thinking about them since), and they are an absolute joy to read aloud. I love reading anything by Mary Doria Russell (a.k.a. one of the only authors for adults I care about) aloud, as well. Of course, there are entire passages from Harry Potter that I still “hear” in the rhythm in which I recited them as a child (often in a bad British accent with my friend Francesca to a highly indulgent audience of our parents).

So this is my spring 2017 advice to you: work hard, care hard, and when you’re tired, immerse yourself in a story that you love, whether your own or someone else’s. Savor the sound of your own voice speaking beautiful words.

Sometimes I worry that I only have one story in me, and that I’m just telling that same story over and over again in different ways. It’s a worry that I imagine a lot of writers share. Impostor syndrome is a strong force in creative circles, and it’s easy to fear that someday we’ll be found out. What if, that doubting voice whispers, everyone discovers that I don’t have that much to say?

But of course all my stories are going to have some things in common. They wouldn’t be mine if they didn’t. And one thing that I’ve realized they share is a deep preoccupation with truth-telling.

This discovery was something of a comfort. Though the capital-T Truth may appear to be flat and non-negotiable, there are actually many things to say about it. As a writer, I am reassured that my stories won’t necessarily all feel exactly the same to my future readers (or my small and beloved gaggle of current readers). As a person, I am reassured that no one will ever run out of worthwhile things to say as long as we’re committed to the truth.

The types of truth-telling that interest me the most are speaking truth to power and speaking truth to the self. Neither one is easy, and both rely on the other. I don’t think it’s possible to speak truth to power until you’ve figured out what you believe in, which requires figuring out who you are and who you want to be. But I also don’t think it’s possible to truly be honest to yourself without feeling the need to speak up and speak out about the important things in life.

After all, how can you protest or make phone calls or argue or attend meetings or engage in any other means of resistance — up to and including straight up breaking unjust laws — without first admitting that you’re sad and angry and afraid? These are not easy truths. They require you to admit that you’re not in control of everything in your life, and that just opens up a whole other can of worms. Our own lack of control is everything that we hide from. When we stop hiding from it — well. It can be unpleasant.

The alternative, though, is pretending that everything is fine. As any writer will tell you, stories need conflict. There can be no growth, no change, until that conflict is acknowledged. And yeah, there are some real life conflicts I really wish had been avoided. I’m definitely not saying that all the awful things happening in the world are okay because they lead to ~personal growth or anything like that. There is an upside to admitting your own sadness and anger and fear to yourself, though. Once you acknowledge those things, you get to tell yourself another truth: that you care. And a caring person is a beautiful thing to be able to see when you look in the mirror.

So I guess that’s another running theme in the stories that I write: I write about people who are learning how to care. And if that’s the only story I have in me, then I’m okay with that. That story is beautiful, and I believe that it is true.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about good guys and bad guys this week. It sure seems like there are a lot of the latter these days, with more popping up in the news every day. Bad guys in high positions of power, bad guys passing unjust laws. So does bad leadership and bad laws make a country — well, bad?

As I said in my last post, I know what I believe when I’ve written it, so I have a couple of answers to that question. They both come from THE CHILDREN’S WAR (a.k.a. story). The first, which played on my mind a lot as the refugee ban went into effect on Holocaust Remembrance Day, is a synthesis of two reactions from two of my protagonists upon reading about crimes against humanity that their empire has perpetrated. One character refuses to believe this information is true; the other knows that it is. Paraphrased, their reactions, respectively, are: “If that were true, then we’d be the Enemy!” and “It goes against everything we stand for.”

These statements contradict each other, but they’re both true. I always knew I was writing about my own country when writing story, but I also always thought I was exaggerating at least a little bit. Now it seems that I’m not. Right now, America’s bad leadership and bad laws have made my country a force for bad in the world. That is true.

However. It goes against everything so many Americans stand for. Elsewhere in story, another character explains that he has struggled to put his country above the people he loves, because the people he loves are his country. You can’t serve one and neglect the other at the same time. “America” is not an independent entity, a personal god with its own wishes and personality that demands worship and fealty. America is Americans. Some of them are awful. Most of them are not.

That’s not unique to America. I totally reject any notion of a country being the “best country in the world,” because all countries are made of people: some awful, most not. That’s just the general demographic of every group of humans in the entire world. Unfortunately, the awful ones are great at grabbing power. To stay there, they try to exploit any latent cruelty they can find in others, because we’re all microcosms of our species in general. A little bad, mostly good. That balance can tip if we let it. If we give into the easiness of willful ignorance, the comfort of a false persecution complex (pro-tip: real persecution never feels comfortable), or the thrill of fear for the other, then we’ll wake up to find that we’ve joined the ranks of the bad guys. The more privilege you have in your society — so if you’re American, if you’re white or male or straight or financially stable or cis or able-bodied or neurotypical (and I’m a fair few of these, so I’ve got to be careful) — the easier this process is. It must be resisted.

So remember what you stand for. Don’t accept anything that goes against that. Remember that the balance of people in the world is still and always will be “mostly good.” Remember that that’s true of every group of people you’re supposed to fear.

Explicitly: remember that that’s true of Muslims. Remember that refugees are refugees because they’ve already suffered under the bad guys. Don’t be another bad guy making their life hell. Oppose those who do.

I know that “bad guy” and “good guy” are flat and unnuanced terms, but the reason they’ve been on my mind is that the Muslim refugee ban is, flatly and without a shred of nuance, bad. It is wrong. It is evil. It is the Enemy of the good guys. It is, currently, American.

Of course, there are plenty of non-Americans in the groups I’ve just mentioned, too, because American goodness is not just American, but human. Our good people are not better than anyone else’s good people. We don’t have to be. Goodness isn’t a competition. Greatness isn’t a competition, either, as much as some people would like you to believe that it is. Greatness is the combined goodness of many. Goodness and greatness are both a hell of a lot of work, and I’m trying to learn how to do that work, from all of the people mentioned above and more. Check out those links. Take care of yourselves. Learn and work. Be the good guys.

Listen, I’m not going to write a thinkpiece about the state of the country/world/human race here. I’m sure you’ve all read as many of those as I have lately, and I’m not really in the mood to read, let alone write, one more. Instead, what I’ve got at the end of this bizarre year is a list, some quotes, and some writing.

Because I’ve been a terrible blogger this year (again) (look, it’s on the New Year’s resolution list) (…again), here’s a list of some things that happened in my life this year:

I wrote two separate Strongly Worded Emails in a professional setting (one to a potential employer, one to an actual employer) about how they were Doing It Wrong (the former about mental illness, the latter about racism in children’s literature).

I got fired for the first time, from the actual employer in the above bullet point. I genuinely don’t know if these two things are related. Either way, no regrets.

I’ve spent about six months of this year getting paid to teach in some capacity, which is a major step down the life goals path.

I was the maid of honor at my beautiful twin’s wedding and now I have a brother-in-law! This is the best bullet point on this list.

I wrote the first draft of middle-grade story, several drafts of werewolf story (Misbegotten Creatures), and two academic papers.

I presented one of those papers at a conference.

I’ve dedicated at least two hours every week to political action since November 8th )(and will continue to do so from now on). I’ve also pretty much held on to my mental health since then, which given the specific nature of my intrusive thoughts is something to be damn proud of.

Which leads us to the quotes. I’ve written on this blog before about my two tattoos, which both involve flora and words. The words are “Watch me” (and though context-less on my ribs, the intended context is from Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go) and “with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah” from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” (Clearly, this was one of the many deaths of 2016 that got to me, but at least he was actually fairly old, unlike some of the others.) I’ve been thinking a lot about both of those lines lately, about how I’ve etched determination despite all odds into my body. After all, the lines leading up to the end of the last verse of “Hallelujah” include “and even though it all went wrong,” and anyone who’s read Chaos Walking knows that like 2 of 10,000 of the things that happen in those books are actually good things. The plants, too, are about this: a branch from a willow tree, fragile yet abundant, and a Christmas cactus blossom, which blooms only in the darkest part of the year.

So all of that is who I am and who I will continue to be. I’m glad I already know that about myself. I’m glad I know I’m not one to give up.

Another quote that’s been on my mind is from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: “What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does.” Not much to add to that, other than this line has been a helpful mantra to me in the past, and also we should all try to be more like Hagrid in our daily lives. (I mean, within reason.)

Last quote, also from J.K. Rowling, but this time from an interview. She once said “sometimes I know what I believe because of what I have written.” This has definitely always been the case for me. I have figured out so many things that I think are important (as well as a lot of things about myself) through writing fiction. Sometimes I’ve found it’s a good idea to lean into that and allow writing to help me define my own state of mind. So I wrote a scene that takes place in between story (The Children’s War) and its as-yet-mostly-unwritten sequel that’s about all of the above quotes, as well as waiting, as well as loved ones. And some architectural theology, because why shouldn’t I have some fun with it, too? I’ve been waffling about whether I should put it on this blog, but I wanted the few of you who know these characters to be able to read it if you want. So click through if you’d like, and happy New Year to everyone. I’m glad I get to meet whatever’s coming with all of you.

Well, the New Year’s resolution to blog more clearly hasn’t been working out so well.

In my defense, life has been hectic and odd since my last post. Yeah, I know, what else is new? I’m sure everyone’s heard the oft-told historical tidbit that Michelangelo could envision his entire sculpture when he looked upon an untouched block of marble. Well, my life is still mostly uncarved, and I don’t have Michelangelo’s power of foresight. But I’m chipping away anyway.

The job situation has been rather an adventure this year, but the good news is all of the teaching experience I’ve gained has been really great and helpful for moving forward. It feels really good to be able to say that I know I want teaching to be my long-term day job. And if I may be taking a circuitous route to actual job permanence and/or security (ha haaa), at least I know that’s only because I have an extra consideration when planning my future: writing. It always comes first, even when it doesn’t feel like it — i.e., when I can barely squeeze an hour in because of various other life factors. But I’m juggling all these life factors specifically because I’m trying to find a path that intellectually, emotionally, and temporally (hardest one) allows me to be a better writer.

The stress of uncertainty has been getting to me a lot lately, but I’ve been looking at it all wrong. I’ve not only been searching for a writing-friendly life, but also a life where I get to help people on a daily basis, and those aren’t the easiest conditions to fill! Just because I haven’t been able to completely crack that particular code yet doesn’t mean I’m not a functional adult. What my continued quest to do so does prove is that I’m really freaking dedicated to not just the act of writing, but also the values and passions that inform every story I write.

Sooo that was a pretty important personal revelation. Uh, thanks for sharing in that with me. ANYWAY, and update on writing: I recently finished the first draft of middle-grade story, hooray! (And a full two weeks before my self-imposed deadline, which, given what this summer looked like, is a minor miracle.) It went exactly how I thought it would, which is to say endlessly frustrating. But I got to know my protagonist and several other key characters very well, which is (in my process, at least) the point of a first draft. I even wrote like 5 or so scenes that may survive into the next draft! Not too bad for the queen of the blank page rewrite.

While middle-grade story sits in a corner and thinks about what it’s done, I’m now embarking on some (more) revisions for MISBEGOTTEN CREATURES. I’ve jokingly (“jokingly”) referred to MC as the therapy book, because writing it forced me to deal with some Issues. But after speaking with my agent (nearly two years in and still not tired of saying that), I understand that pushing myself a little bit further is necessary — but also doable. Which is something to be proud of, I think. I realize that’s kind of vague, but suffice to say I’m happy with this development and am excited to improve this manuscript that means so much to me.

And of course there are many more things happening right now, but I’ll leave it there for now. I will continue to update this blog (hopefully more often…) as I keep carving out a life for myself. Even though I can’t imagine the end result yet, I have a feeling I’m going to love it.